The photo book

 

General Photography

Following up on one of Alec’s posts about photo books, I remembered an interview I had read (in a book) the other day. Luckily, it’s also available online: “I think there’s something aesthetically very satisfying about these books and some of that may derive from my past experience with other books. There’s the way the image sits on the page. There’s the intimacy of looking at the book. There’s simply the experience of seeing the images in a book as opposed to, say, a portfolio: it recalls past book experiences; it is a cultural object. And, in these small (short) volumes, there’s the mind’s ability to hold the whole book at once. The book becomes a single, unified work.” (Stephen Shore). And that’s really quite an important point there: “a cultural object”, and add to that the sheer tactile component.